In a Marketing World that is Known

We've had holding companies by data companies, We've had data analytics companies by creative agencies, and they've become kind of tacked on in parts of a whole. But really what Known is doing is they've taken those three components that are equal experts and truly created one agency that works together on equal parts to create and bring the best creative work and the best kind of need based marketing

to their clients and their consumers. Yeah, Alex, I think it's an interesting business model that Ross and Kerner after in bringing data and creativity to the center together. And I think coming into the conversation with Ross and Kern was really kind of posing a question or or had a question of well, who wins in a tiebreaker and you're actually going to hear this in the show. Does

does data lead or does creativity lead? And even as I think over the last few episodes, we've had this sort of tension of well, is it numbers or is it gut? I think it's interesting to think about this as you listen to the conversation is this an ant or is this an oor situation? And I think this converse, Asian has been one that the industry has been having for years now, and we've been having on this show for for three seasons, yeah, and the last ten fifteen years.

And I think that Ross and Kern are onto something that is different, the details of which and the nuance of which comes through in this conversation. So with that, we'll be right back. We are back at Landia with exciting partners from yield Mo. We are here with Lisa Bradner GM of Analytics and Teddy John d E, head of Product. So we're here to talk with Lisa and Teddy about making attention actionable over the next four episodes of Atlantia. Let's start from the top. What is yield Mo.

Yield Mo is a next generation marketplace powered by attention analytics superior formats and real time data. So Lisa would love for you to expand on what yield mo does and share with our listeners how yield mo thinks about and approaches the market. Well, I think you have to start with you know the vision everybody has for advertising, right, we have this perfect vision. We're advertising flows like water. The right people see your ad, they get the right creative,

they're inspired, they go by your product. Every impression is valuable and it just flows right. Doesn't quite work like that, never has, But I think you know Programmatic. When that launched, we were really trying to say, how do we connect this ecosystem and make everything flow? With programmatic, We've spent all the time talking about the pipes, like it's so cool. We can deliver a lot more impressions, a lot faster,

we can reach your entire audience. But you know what, if you're put in sewage in those pipes, you've just wasted a whole lot of money really really quickly. So I like to step back and say, all right, great, we've built the infrastructure, we're great blumber, but let's talk about what we're putting through those pipes. Let's make sure

it's quality. Let's make sure it's clean, let's make sure everybody knows that it's fraud free and can be trusted, and let's make sure we're not poisoning our own ecosystem. What do you when you talk about quality? I think that's such an interesting part of the conversation. Quality is a great question. Right. As an industry, we've been sort of stuck in lowest common denominator. Right, we talked about viewability, and we talk about fraud free or you were seen

by a human not a box. But if you even look into the definition of view ability, it is a really, really really split second of moment where it's on the page. It's not exactly something I think that any brand person would say, Yeah, my brand showed up great. But it's a place to start, and it was a common denominator

we could all rally around. But the reason we look at attention at yield mode in addition to those signals is we want to go a layer deeper to say, all right, we know it was seen by a human being, we know it was on the screen, and how long did they care, were they interested? Did they signal that to them it was a quality? Add experience and something

they wanted to engage further in. And the better job we can do of matching the person, the device, the impression, the time, and the creative the higher quality that add experience is going to be for everybody. So how is yield MO helping the industry navigate the pipes? We have a marketplace with highly curated, high quality inventory, but it's not a walled garden, right, anybody can play and the

data goes in, the data goes out. We are working across the ecosystem to find the highest quality inventory, bring our formats and our data to that and create a really really great brand experience that's good for the user tou that's in the context of what they're looking at, and bring all that together to make sure that we're delivering quality experiences and that the money we're spending is going to quality publishers. Teddy, what are your thoughts on

AD experiences? Those two words actually don't typically go together, but the meaning when you put those words together around actually creating an AD experience that someone wants and potentially even anticipated right or needed, I think actually does create an experience. How are you guys thinking about that? Well, that's the idea behind quality advertising is can you deliver an ad experience to a user that actually influences and allows them to make a brand decision. And that's what

we try to do it. You'll most we try to You know, there's a great technology out there. You can buy ads and serve them anywhere, but what is actually making an impact? And we focus on trying to allow marketers to seed at with with our investment and attention and so they can quickly decide, well, this is working and this isn't You do you both talk about the

kind of green spaces, what i'll call green shoots. Are you working with brands do you identify through these different ad experiences new white spaces and green shoot areas for their products for audience development? And if so, how are you thinking about that? I love this notion of green shoots. Right. I've always said when you work in marketing, you're always dating, You're never married. Right. Every time you show up it's a chance to impress your customer and you never get

to hang out in the catch and sweatpants. Right, It's like you've got to prove yourself every day. But you know, I think that if you think about those fast moving media metrics. If you can be really agile with the ad experience and when with the data, you can recognize when a green shoot is happening. And I think as marketers, we've always gone top down, right, here are my segments, here are the people I'm talking to. But you know,

we saw this in the pandemic. People who hadn't bought certain brands in twenty years all of a sudden ripped them off the shelf. So as a brand person, you've always have to be listening for that surprise signal that signals an opportunity you may not be thinking about. And our agile data structure allows our brands to work with us to do just that. Lisa Bradner, Teddy Jwadi from yield Mo, thank you for being our partners, Thank you for coming on at Landia, Thank you for having us,

and we are back at Landia. Welcoming back to guests. Curren Jeerson, Chairman and CEO of Known, and Ross Martin, president and Chief Experience Officer of Known, Welcome, guys, welcome, thank you great to be here, so good. So the first question everyone wants to know is what is known? Known came together out of three? Really? Uh, leaving companies. Company I found it almost twenty years ago is a

data science and advanced analytics company me UM. It's called it was called Cheerson Associates, which is my last name. So you can see I was not on the creative side. You don't you don't want to hire me for naming. I think I added the associates so people would think I had associates. But that was about his That was about as creative as a god. But this was a company that was doing data science before it was called

data science. For a lot of the big tech companies are our clients for twenty years, like Google and Microsoft and Amazon. UM. So tons of PhDs and just number crunctures and the other components come out of the brilliant creative mind and strategic mind of Ross Martin, who ran a company called Blackbird that I think somehow he must have been strategic because he got you guys to talk about it well two years ago. He was with us two years ago talking about Blackbird. Let him back in.

I want him back in. I want current to continue talking about knowing. But I will just stop for one second for an ad for Atlanta to say when I was originally on your podcast. I think I got seventeen calls, so I think I owe you a chunk of cash. And anybody ever, anybody who ever shows up on this podcast, if you make it this far, you're good. Like Malcolm Gladwell, congratulations, you have now made it and you have a chance at the same kind of career that I have had

over the last few years. Because I was on this and they add, you were the first guest to do

live poetry on Atlantia. So Kern, I hear that you may try to want I may, I may so fastinuing with known U, the third component of this, the third heat, if you will, came out of a group called Stunt Creative, which is really a best in class creative and production studio at l A. Again you know, twenty years in the business, won every award on the planet, and the unifying belief that brought us together was this idea that art and science needed to live together in a real way,

not in a big box consultancy buys global creative agency way, and um, you know, we felt like there was a place for these capabilities to sit around the table as equals, as friends, as partners, um, where everybody had a superpower, but we all wanted to work together to create the right outcome for our clients. So kar and put that into practice, right because you're doing a tremendous amount of work with TikTok right now seeing some of the work you're doing with the A n A around see her.

So if you look at the spectrum of work that you have, the body of work that's out in the market, when you bring together those three pillars data, strategy, creativity, how is that manifesting? It's a great question, um So,

So I think the the process. You know, what you see is creative, and what you see is creative that you hopefully remember, um And that really is evocative, and that is hitting you in a place and at a time that makes sense, right, and that that those other aspects are not what people remember, but they're part of our process. So the place we like to start is with the fundamental questions. And this goes back to the name.

You know, like we wouldn't be in the marketing and advertising industry if we hadn't a long and hired about the seven different meanings of our name. But that you know, the first question is like what know yourself as a brand? Right, Well, what do you stand for? What do you mean in the world? Know your customers? Uh, why do they care about you? What do they think, feel and believe about you? And what do they need to know to understand whether or not you fit into their life? And then how

do you make that know? How do you bring that to life insights out, emotion and in a way that it creates a real emotional fonts and though that that is the process. So like when we sit down, whether it's with a client, TikTok or see her or vivent or any of these or memorial sunkettering, right, it's those questions in that order. Um, what is this brand, what's

happening to it? How does it exist in the world, How do we find the right audiences, how do we connect with them in the times and places and ways that makes sense? How do we bring that into being in a way that's beautiful and evocative and and it's great you know that people see our creative on the world and remember it. But the process that gets it there is really what we think drives a lot of the impact for our clients because we're not wasting impressions,

we're not wasting the audience's time. So that's that's sort of the science side that's harder to see and touch, but is really part of why we think this stuff works so hard for our clients. So ross last time you were on the show, UM, we were talking all things Blackbird. How did Blackbird come to work with Current?

So Blackbird came to work with Kern and also with Jeff Kingsley, who is the chief operating officer of Sheerson and now the president and CEO of Known, and also came to work with Brad Roth and Mark Feldstein from Stun because back in the day by Coom, when I was running marketing, UM, I was their clients. Sheerson Associates and Stun were like my secret weapons, and so I knew very well what those two companies were capable of and how fantastic they were they you know, even if

other people didn't know that yet. UM, and I was making a living on the work they were doing. Um. The truth is Blackbirds, as you know, it was going well. It was two two and a half years old, and I loved it. But every once in a while, or like once in your lifetime, there's a generational opportunity to do something really unique. And special, not just disruptive, but game changing. So the hypothesis of known represented a generational opportunity.

If what we believe to be true UM and possible could actually be achieved, then this this wouldn't be sort of just a good business opportunity, but it would be a game changing UM I guess inflection point for how

marketing gets done in the twenty one century. And I know it sounds like I'm vastly overstating that, and maybe I'm a couple of years ahead of other people getting what we're trying to do, and it probably sounds a little arrogant, But in the beginning, we weren't sure, right, So we put these companies together and we started to try to go to market together as a unified set

of capabilities. And think of it almost like as a moment of Pangaea where the continents come back together on Earth, when the marketing capabilities and advertising capabilities that never should have been separated are actually unified and there's no fidelity loss between them. When that happens, you actually returned to being UM. Not is efficient and effective and transparent, but you can actually align the goals of your company with

the business interests of your clients. And when you can do that, then you provide the first meaningful alternative to the holding company model in a long long time. That's the opportunity that I saw. That's the opportunity that we saw, And more importantly, it's it's the opportunity that dozens of clients saw and and and really pulled us together um to provide a comprehensive set of marketing services for them. So a lot of holding companies would say the same thing,

what is setting known apart? What I think is setting us apart is truly best in class in every discipline. Right In some cases, and I was kind of joking about it before, you've got companies that are pretty good at data and analytics and process and technology trying to glue on creative capability. And now you know exactly how that relationship works. You know who is the step child of who, and who drives? You know who's got the bigger revenue line and what bread is butter were right,

like we all know, um. And in other cases, you've got a creative shop or a traditional media buying company hiring a couple of people who maybe have an undergrad degree in math or economics and no a little are or sequel and they're like, no, we have data capabilities, or even buying a data company, which by the way, is like the most ridiculous thing for supposedly impartial agency

to be doing. But leaving that to the side for a second, what we thought was exciting about this in kind of the cultural synergy that led up to this combination was not just the thesis, not just the business opportunity, but the cultural synergies and the fact that currently the top creative director at Known Studios won't stop calling our chief technology officer to talk about you know, non stochastic

modeling and like creative optimization. It's like, that's happening, that's actually happening because the creative team is totally gigging out on the data. The data scientists, and you know, this is also a real, a real different thing. We've got like postdoctoral PhD data scientists, like actual data scientists who extend the analytics capability of clients like Amazon and Microsoft and Google when they're not working on our advertising clients.

And that's that's not that's not even in the realm of firepower at these other agencies and our creatives who are making these moments that break culture are also best in class and they love each other. And our strategists are sitting there in the middle of it saying, I cannot believe like the weapons that we get to deploy both on the inbound customer insight and the creation of breakthrough storytelling. So who gets the tiebreaker in data versus gut? Well,

there there isn't one. That's not a that's not like it's that's just not the process that we run. The like they're not at odds with each other. What happens is are creative and strategy teams have brilliant ideas, and as often happens in creative ideation and all the sort of like work that leads up to an incredible campaign is there are a bunch of things that people love. And then there's like that final round of tweaking and tuning of like do we alpha this up or down?

Like what's the color mix? How big is the like how much do we pull into the foreground background? Like what you know where? Like how tight is the focus those things? It turns out you don't have to guess, So the gut is all there like that you see the heart I would think in our TikTok campaigns, you see the heart and see her. You see the heart in what everything our studios turns out, and like the creative minds at work there, like that's real, that wasn't

computer generated. And then the question is of all the thousands of different perspectives and backgrounds and sort of the constellation of audience out there. Each person is a little bit different, each platform is a little bit different. So how do I match the absolute best version of the creative to the right individual audience member based on everything I can into it about them in the right place, at the right time, in the right format, on the

right platform. That's where data takes creative and like beautiful creative, evocative, creative and supercharges it. And that's where we see the results going absolutely crazy. I want to go back to something that you said that I think is probably if we don't go back to his probably passed over pretty easily. You have twenty five pH d data scientists and analytics folks working with Amazon, Google, Microsoft, not on marketing creative.

We have about seventy analytics people working outside of the marketing space. I'm just talking about like the what I was trying to say, is of the of the advanced degrees working in advertising? These are not people when we like, you see listings out there and tors when we're not trying to you see listings out there for you know, data scientists or advertising analysts, and they'll say things like, you know, Excel skills are a must. Excel skills are

not a must, right like they're there there. There are

profoundly more powerful tools. And so when we when when we list a position for a data scientists, that's a person who's coming out of uh typically like a postdoctoral fellowship up at a leading academic institution, and you know, the folks on that team talk about sort of rehabilitating academics and and helping them find these new careers, you know, from physics finding looking searching for the ghost particle in in mild cubic mild blocks of Arctic ice, to trying

to identify audience signals in social and and digital environments. And our strategy and our analytics and data science teams are beating out their pure play competitors with clients like Google and Amazon and Facebook. Can you double down on the seamlessness of your data scientists talking to your creative leads. Is that appairing that we need to see more of in the market. I think it's the thing that UM, I, at the end of the day get most excited about

in our business. And in this sort of crazy concoction that that we're delivering, that's what really he got us there, That's what got us to the point of saying, we all have great businesses. Can you give us an example where like you were in a creative pitch and you you brought out data scientists and it was like, at that point, completely unexpected for the narrative of what I'm assuming brand marketers typically here in a creative pitch. Yeah, look,

it happens all the time. We were I don't want to name the client, but we were working on a pretty important campaign that started with a deep dive into some micro segmentation, and um what we found in the micro segmentation and the attributes and you've got a data scientists sort of walking through like these are the drive this is the driver model of you know, who is likely to be persuadable of outcome air B or c um and And what we realized in that was that

the the creative that the client wanted was something that was really sort of edgy and sharp and fresh, and what and what the audience wanted was to be spoken to an authentic way about values, right like, and you could see it and it just like it spun the creative ideation around, not because that not because it's not like not because they were being lectured by the data scientists, but because they were discovering it together, because the data

scientist was surfacing a constellation of attributes and the creatives were saying, hold on, that's not what was That's not what was in the brief at all, Like what you're telling me? And am I understanding this? Right? Like if you're saying that it's suburban zip codes and it's you know, non Apple devices and it's you know, these kinds of demos, like that's not what they're asking for. Why are we

doing that? And like you could just feel this this momentum building and jelling around a different vision of the opportunity and and the arc of the story that needed to be told for this brand that wasn't gonna get told But wasn't. It wasn't a research report that was plopped down on a desk, right it was it was a live collaboration and and by the way, that goes in both directions, you know, and I've seen creative teams working through a pitch and coming back to the scientists

and saying like, can we test this? Does this feel right? Like? How would we start to focus into signals and social media to understand if I've got the right phrasing here, the right meme, the right kind of moment and culture like is this what it needs to be? Or should I look over here? Because I can't. I'm weighing these two options. And so sometimes it's the refinement. Sometimes it's a kind of a revelation. And then I think what happens after the fact. We look at the performance of

all these campaigns, even if their brand campaigns. We're running five seconds snapshots of every exposure that happened in every five seconds, and what are all of the what's all

the metadata around that? How do we understand that atomic intersection of creative an audience and every day the path and matching that happens, which is a collaborative process between the creatives and the data scientists together reviewing these five second snapshots and reviewing these sort of patterns and trends that are coming out leads to a re racking of some of the really hyper specific nuances of the creative

as it's happening in each platform and each subsegment. So they're like, okay, all right, we gotta swap out that art because like it's definitely like that stuff is not working on Facebook. It's working great on you know, on digital display, but we got like and for search, I feel like this copy right here, let's change that one word like And then the brainstorming happening with the data scientists and the creatives at once, saying why that word,

what do we think it could be? What do we think like what is working in other parallel platforms, and you know what, like we literally had a moment. We're swapping out a single word in digital display, drove the results of that ad by one word. What you're seeing is really exciting to me, and it's actually very different. So what people aren't doing. People aren't actually going off of their web metrics or their basic campaign metrics, or

they've got isolated first party data and analytics. What you're doing because you're talking about the whole thing and the right stuff at the right time and that's easy to say, but lots of folks when they're talking about data and analytics, they're talking about campaign metrics. And something we talked about was the hypothesis that more brands, more companies, more marketers need to build a multi layer hypothesis hypotheses and run them.

That's exactly right. The campaign is the beginning right day. What if you were to ask me, uh, the night before a big campaign launches, like, is this gonna work tomorrow?

I'll say, I don't know if it's going to work tomorrow morning, but I think it has a better chance of working by mid day or later in the day because of what we learned in the morning, right Like, the very beginning of a persistent optimization loop is the most exciting time because what you're doing is treating everything that's going out in the world as a social experiment

that you get to learn from. And the more quickly you can metabolize that information and act on those insights with the help of machine learning and an AI, the more quickly you can optimize. Whether it's the creative, the channel, the time, the messaging, the copy itself, the beating algorithm,

it's all of those. That's why we say, for a campaign like the one we are about the launch on Sunday, if you were looking from our control room, you'd see ten to twenty permutations going out at the same time, and we're gonna learn a lot from each one of them in real time. Can you tell us about the

campaign that's going out Sunday. Yeah, So we took on a new client where the Agency of Credit's Vivint, the I V I n T Home security UH company, and and it's a smart home company essentially, and you know it's it's it's becoming a loud, noisy competitive space, especially during the pandemic. This is a company that is hot

as hell, like they are performing incredibly well. It's a publicly traded company, but current multi multibillion dollar company four percent on aided awareness, right like just you just haven't heard of it because it is loud, it's noisy out there.

But but that's about to change. And um, we've got a really fun campaign or as Ross would say, campaigns um that that's going to support them out there in the world coming up with and there's gonna be some time pole placements and I want to come back to also like the art of this is not lost. The core creative is super funny, you're gonna see it. And what's the right sequencing of creative and how do you

move people from awareness to advocacy to intent? Right like that, those things, like they're massive differences based on what they see in what order, even if all the creatives great, what what's what's really really interesting about this moment in time for Adlandia fans, right because the marketing and advertising

community listens to this podcast religiously. Here's the thing, like there we're sort of seeing a bifurcation in the CMO land, right, Like there are cmos who are you know, are just not ready for this stuff, Like they don't really need to care that much and they're just sort of managing as they did before. But there's a new breed of

cmos and marketing leadership. For example, you mentioned TikTok. We couldn't do what we do if if they didn't have Nick Trent in that seat leading that team, if they didn't have a team that was just excited about the marriage of art and science as we are. We couldn't do it with just any client. And what's fantastic about the clients that we've been able to assemble. It's not that they're all big brand, awesome names, which many of them are, but they are all of sort of the

future economy of marketing. These are all human beings who understand everything we are talking about on this podcast right now, and they do it. That's why the marketing flywheel can actually happen. TikTok's a unique example because it's such a gigantic global platform and there's so much happening to create culture every minute, but the same can be sort of done for so many brands and so many categories, and

one by one we're proving that. So talk a little bit about data as it relates to strategy, because so much of what we've seen in the headlines in our industry is thinking about your tech stack, your data stack as being means to find an audience, right when I think about the world of programmatic and addressable, But very rarely in this industry are we privy to the conversation of data science as it relates to creative optimization in the work, not the delivery of it in the work.

So it's a it's a great question because I think the thing that's so often missed on the kind of Apple location of data to advertising is this reality that bad advertising and badly targeted advertising is paid for by the audience. Right, that's just a tax that you had to pay when they showed like Ross's kids are, you know, junior high school in high school, when somebody shows him a Pamper's ad that he pays for, that it didn't fund the content he was watching and they wasted his time.

And so not showing Ross that Pampers at his service, um, showing Ross an ad for a product that I thinks unless you tell me otherwise, Showing Ross an ad for a product that he's genuinely interested in in a category that he's exploring. I'm not talking about retargeting, but like that's intuitively applicable to Ross's life. That is informative, that is funny, that is joyful, that's that's not a tax

on Ross's attention, that's additive to the experience. And so what we try and do is stay in that zone. And like I sometimes I do get excited as like a nerd about you know, all the things we can learn from all of the signal that's coming out of

our lives. I also I want to be really measured as a human being about the question of how would I feel about that the application of that whether or not it's legally obtained, whether or not it's gdp R compliant, Like, how would I feel about the application of that data point to what's happening in my media consumption experience right now? I hear you. I think that's awesome. I think you guys are setting up for a post cookie world, which I don't actually think a lot of companies, at least

a lot of cmos are not thinking about yet. Unquestionably, we actually just did a project in the publishers side of our business for one of the largest publishers on the planet that I want that I'm on name here. That was Cookieless World. That was basically, how do you build a smart and virtuous ad business um and how do you part anticipate as a platform of scale in a cookuous world. So the people on that side are starting to think about it, But I agree that wave

hasn't really hit the cmos yet. They're like, they're gonna get pulled into it, and I'm glad we're on the forefront of it, but it's not sort of broadly out there yet. So what is known want to be known for? Like, what is the influence you want to have on this industry short term? Long term? I'll tell you there are

two things. UM. So they're like there's the part of me that's just excited about seeing the alchemy of you know, ardent science in like a real partnership of equals UM in doing this stuff and breaking down some of the barriers in the way that people when professionals talk to each other like it's a real thing and we shouldn't, you know, Like people are bigger than those boxes of data scientists and creative director and that's that's just an amazing thing to watch and to watch happen in the

world of modern marketing as people get more fluent and more dynamic in how they use this stuff. There's also the competitive oppositional like grumpy business person in UM and I get incredibly frustrated when I see structures in place that are self serving and designed to impede the intellectual

metabolism of an environment like this. And I think unintentionally, but over many, many decades, we've created a structure in the traditional media planning and buying environment that deliberately holds back the evolution of the industry and and the passion that I had for like going all in, Like guess what, like, you own a data science and analytics company in you don't need like nobody said you should really merge with a creative agency, right, Like That's like that's everybody wants

to be a data science and analytics company in for all the wrong reasons. But that's that's like a good

place to be. And the thing that I think made me and all the other partners in that company want to go all in on this was having the deep experience we had on the publisher side seeing all the amazing investments publishers and platforms are making to expose their inventory and novel ways, and then also on the on the client side seeing next generation marketers like Ross talked about making massive strides to do things differently and in a smarter way, in a more efficient way, and then

watching this thing just get stuck because the economic models for how these transactions get handled and processed are broken. Look like when I was working at Viacom with an incredible group of people who are trying to do things a different way and trying to bring media out into

the marketplace in a different way. And and the whole problem, though, is if they go transparent, If the platforms and publishers are transparent and advanced and integrated, and they expose their inventory brank banks with real time discoverable pricing, which even TV companies do now for television, and you've got data savvy, aggressive marketers on the other side, like, how do I make money as a media buying platform? Like I'll tell you how we make money. We say, oh, that's cool,

Like we have incredible data scientists. We're happy to have them support your team, work with our creative folks. Optimize the ship out of this not by not by telling you you can't buy it on your own, not by telling the upfront scary. The upfront is so scary you can't go in there. We have to value and so like that passion for adding actual, real hard value to this ecosystem made us realize that, like, you have to have all these things together, You've got to really do

it right and and it's all or an nothing. We need to be the place where the best people on the planet come to do the best work of their lives. How are you training talent? How are you training future marketers? That's hard. In fact, I think it's one of our greatest challenges because it's really difficult for us to recruit as you can imagine the kind of talent that's required as at this level from other agencies. We do a lot of recruiting out of the top colleges and universities

and you know post doc programs in the world. Um. Many of the people who come and work and known just aren't from this industry, and the perspective and the brilliance that they bring is what's sort of rejuvenating everything. UM. And then you know, world class creative talent and strategic talent like hard to find and incredibly in demand. UM. But but we we've been lucky so far in that we've built a culture that people want to be part of.

So if you think about every new person that joins our company, they're sort of recoding the d N a person by person that's Adam by Adam right, and they're adding us their own apps to this operating system and they're making it better. And that's sort of happening now at a pace that I don't know that we could have imagined a year ago, especially given you know, how is gone. But We've been very fortunate, and I think

now the most important thing is healthy growth. What do you both think it takes to break through going into I think Ross and I and and Mark and Brad and all the you know, creatives and scientists at talk about this a lot, and we talk about it in the context of some of our values right around sort

of authenticity, UM and honesty. There's no doubt and we we recently you know, you talked about we feel like I felt like there was a real UM has been a real hard reset in the culture and and there are a lot like a lot of things have changed, need to change, will change UM coming out of this experience, and I'm an optimist about where it all ends. But we also felt like we needed to reset and put our finger back on the pulse of what was happening

in the world. So we ran this huge self funded study of the human condition in UM that we just recently. What did it say? It said that in a in a sort of a universal experience and phenomenon, it's hitting different people very differently. UM and UH. The kinds of things that are UH, that are allowing some people to survive and thrive are not the things you think, it's not your economics standing. Um, it's not even necessarily your

career um or your position. Um. It looked to us through this sort of qualitative and quantitative segmentation that it had to do with your relationships, your strong ties, your relationships with people in your life, your sense of purpose, and your sense of place and connection to your community. And that all makes sense, right when you break it out like that, that that all makes sense. But it wasn't necessarily how we were lensing, and it wasn't how our

clients we're seeing it. It wasn't about the tropes of in extraordinary times, right, And there's a lot of deeper data there too, But but those things all struck us as like foundational human authentic building blocks of who you are and why you are and so first and foremost who we're trying to ask ourselves those questions for any creative it's like, does this is this real? Does this

speak to anyone? I think you know you always want to do that in the process, but I think it's like it's twice as important right now to get back to for any given brand, like what is your purpose? What is your place in the lives of your audience, your consumers, your constituency um and how do you want to talk to those people. Alexa hit this home in our Malcolm Gladwell episode and referencing David versus Goliath scenario of not losing sight of those relationships with our consumer

and what matters to them. And I'm gonna throw this back to your partner, Ross, because I've had the really great honor of getting to know Ross a few years ago and talking to him and understanding when he was building Blackbird that and Ross, you correct me if I'm wrong, but you were always in the pursuit of truth, and as a marketer, I think maybe that's the that's the

whole point. You bring up a great point, and it's it's sort of an extension of what Kerment was just saying that, like that that is sort of the the dark side of what we're learning about ourselves as a society, especially here in America, is that like, there is no Laura and Alexa. Right, there's Laura and there's Alexa, and you happen to do this show together, but the truth is so different, or maybe just a little different, but it's different for each of you. And so if I

want to reach your heart and make a connection. If I want to change what you think, if I want to get you to turn right when you're normally going to turn left, I actually have to find the central human truth of you. And I can't rely, as I did before, on my own bias on shallow punditry, on assumptions about who you are. Because you're two white women of a certain age who live in the East Coasts, and that's what we used to do. We actually did

that for decades. We cannot afford to waste the marketing dollars on that kind of carelessness and waste the time and attention of that audience, of that audience, when the tools are all available to us. They are now at our finger trips. There is no more excuse for not knowing that. I think we mic drop that. So we'll start with current. Because Karrent has never played the game.

Kerrent killed by d I Y. I think you've heard it from me a few times, Like I would get rid of anybody out there who has gotten themselves boxed into a corner where they're where they're fighting against progress in this industry, where they're pushing back on efficiency and opportunity in in progress UM and that that's not that's not one company, and that's not one category. But like in any category, there's a bunch of UM. So let's get rid of them because like that, we don't have

time and and and the clients deserve better. I'll tell you what I think we've talked about. We feel like we can and should buy doesn't sound like the right word, but but but who we want to go find and

partner with and bring in. We think that there's outside of the US, there's a bunch of tremendous creative assets, creative companies out there who are doing beautiful, amazing work in each of their regions and countries, and who are also increasingly trying to scratch the data action Like who could be incredible additions to our team, incredible extensions of our DNA as Ross said UM as we serve more and more global clients, right, so getting into local markets

with best in class creative for those markets I think makes sense for us. And what I want to keep d I y NG is the process and the culture that connects this thing together. And you know, we talk a lot about the operating system of our clients, but also they an operating system and a belief system for ourselves. And that's the thing we need to never stop building it. Ross killed by d I y I'm gonna kill hate. I'm gonna buy time. I'm gonna build empathy, Ross Kern,

known dot is. If people want to get in touch with you to remix data, science and creativity, how do they get in touch with you? Hello at known dot is and we will say hello back, Ross Kern. Poets of progress? Did you know that I have been for for years since I first met Ross, I've been calling him a business poet. Here is a business poet. I mean, Ross, come on, give us something, Ross, just something to close the episode with something from your book. Let's put it

a little plug here. Ross is a published poet. The cop who rides alone, Ross Martin. It started to thunder. I began to wonder why do we mow our lawns? Then it hit me. The nice lines are pretty when they wake up freshly cut it dawn. Maybe they want to keep growing, but man's too ignorant to stop mowing, So lawns are cut each day because man doesn't care about cutting nature's hair, even if nature doesn't want it that way. I love it Did you write that when

you were fifteen? Yeah? Did I do that in the last episode? No, but I remember you talking and he's always triing that out. I only got one poem and I was fifteen. Can and order, Yes, this opportunity less opportunity Our data side just five out of six. Data Side just will tell you that that is the best title. Can we just say congratulations on this season and this is the podcast. So we're just so grateful to be part of you your world here on a small part,

but thank you so much. You will be coming back. Thank you guys, to Laura coming out of this conversation. The things that shine through for me one, we as marketers and especially cmos, tend to continue to look at the vanity as you call them, vanity metrics. Right, So, what's happening on your website, what's happening in your purchase funnel,

what's happening da da da da. But those are surface metrics, that's surface data and analytics, rather than having creatives and data scientists briefed together, starting together and going to find out what could be known. It's interesting in how Ross and currenter positioning their value prop right, and that it's less so about um one or the other, but how these two things work together, the ability to understand patterns

using data and breakdown at the individual levels. What I took away down to the individual level what creative serves Alexa versus what creative serves Laura and I think marrying that you know this idea of we think so much in the creative spaces art director meets copywriter, but is the new critical pairing data scientists and creative director. Yeah,

I love that. And when you think about designing, designing both product designing, designing both products and campaign or message right against triggers that are about the needs that are filling the needs and understanding the triggers of the consumer first, designing that upfront that should be your brief with a bunch of hypotheses, a bunch of opportunities right to test. And too often I think, you know and Ross kind

of hit on this too often. I think we talk about campaigns and there that that alone is something that starts and ends. And what Ross and Kurn were saying is that this just keeps going, This just keeps learning. And in order to do that, you have to get out in the market. You have to actually have a hook to start reeling in. If you don't have that hook out there and you're not testing multiple iterations, I'm not just talking about messaging and creative, I'm talking about ideas.

I'm talking about products. And so is the question that the CMO becomes more of a growth marketer or is the question that the CMO becomes more of a product person. Is that where we're headed. Yeah, it's interesting when you think about the word programmatic. So much of the emphasis

has been on the automatic part of that word. But really what I heard is using data science to really unpack, unbundle the journey, really think about the message that's going to resonate in that journey, and really thinking about programming the automation versus automating the programming all of that, you know. And on that note, one of the things that Kern said, and he kind of said it quietly, right, it was like a point was about sequencing. We don't actually think

about sequencing enough. This is about design up front. Designing up front the path you're going to take someone, and it has multiple iterations, and it has multiple turning points.

They could take someone down depending on their behavior, depending on where they are in their interesting consideration, and I think that you know, the industry is separated the tools, right, the data science and the analytics and the metrics and point KPIs and those types of things with good creative but those things, as Ross and Kern said, they go

hand in hand. Well yeah, I mean so much of what I've experienced throughout my career is the creative leading that messaging and then using the data science to target audiences right, to go out and find the audience to deliver that message. But by pairing those two things together from the onset, you start thinking less like a planner and more like a programmer designing the journey versus planning it. Kern really got to that when he was talking about

bad advertising is like attacks on the consumer. They thought that was a fascinating That was a great way of saying it. It was a great way of saying it. And I think, so it's less of people been paying with their time. People are paying with their time, And I think it's less about what you want to sell someone and more about how are you reaching someone and making sure that there's value and what you are selling them. There's like this this thing going off in my brain,

going wait a minute. If you look at a standard reporting dashboard in media, one of the metrics you will often find is time spent. But we don't measure the sentiment of the time in so I may capture somebody's attention for thirty sixty seconds, but was that a good experience? What was that time well spent? Right? So central question, what do you want to be known for? That is the question? And speaking of questions, Alexa, We're going to be introducing a new segment on Atlantia called The Burning

Question with Kindred CEO Ian Schaefer so Atlanta. Each week we're gonna be teaming up with Kindred to pose a provocative question to our listeners that explores how popular culture movements affect brand decisions. And we're gonna be asking those questions on Twitter and then some of the responses from the Atlantia community will be read on air and discussed in the podcast in addition to having I and share

his perspective. So week one question has the fear of cancel culture lad brands and the people behind them to develop faux food. Fear of fffing up is the appeal

to everyone, the new appeal to no one. This popular culture, Eat Corporate Culture for breakfast, tweet at Atlantia Podcasts and see c I Shaefer Ian Shaeffer to get into the conversation, and we may have you on one of our next episodes to discuss Laura hit it with the list of all of our friends and family at I Heart who have been so good to us and helped us get back on air. Big thank you to Bob Connal, Carter, Andy, Eric Gayle Val, Michael Jen. We appreciate you. Thank you

so much for this opportunity. We'll see you in two weeks.